


Back and Better Than Ever

by SegaBarrett



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Injuries, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27217774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Frederick gets home from the hospital and has a visitor.
Relationships: Dr. Frederick Chilton/Freddie Lounds
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Back and Better Than Ever

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Hannibal, and I make no money from this.

Frederick Chilton had not had many visitors in the hospital. Those who had come by, even, he couldn’t truly call visitors – more like gawkers, as if they had paid a few quarters and they had come by to see the freak show.

Perhaps he deserved it, considering he had run his hospital as a sort of freak show. 

But still – Hannibal was free - dead, he had heard, but he wasn’t buying that. Will Graham – dead, but he wasn’t buying that, either.

Alana, running around Europe and getting a spectacular tan. 

Jack Crawford, still hard at work, typing away.

He hadn’t looked in a mirror since the first day, when someone had brought him one after he had kept demanding it. He had to know what had happened to him.

He had always been looked at as vain, but he had never fully liked his face. It had always seemed slightly off to him, and he had needed other people to give him praise. He knew, psychiatrist that he was, that he was awash in symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He knew that, in theory, those with NPD were covering up a fear of failure.

He wasn’t sure that he could be afraid of failure anymore, now that they were such good friends. Now, he was mostly afraid that saying that it couldn’t get any worse was just some kind of dare to the universe.

He couldn’t read in the barometric chamber, and he couldn’t do much else in there either. He was enclosed, claustrophobic, as the primary attraction was people coming in to attempt to repair him piece by piece.

None of them tried to talk to him for long. 

So when one day, the door cracked open in the distance and Freddie Lounds entered, Chilton didn’t know exactly what to expect. 

“I’d like to interview you,” Freddie said, after a few greetings so disinterested that she didn’t even give Chilton a moment to respond to any of it. “You have the story the public needs to hear. Or, we could make it a whole book, if you would prefer.”

“A book? What exactly…” Chilton’s voice rattled as his teeth clicked together. He was never going to get used to that, never get used to feeling as if his new face made him look like a skeleton hanging on the wall of a Halloween store. “Would this… book… be about?”

“It would be your story. The story that people need to hear. You’ve been a hero, Dr. Chilton. And the world needs to know how you suffered for your heroism. How Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham set you up.”

“What does that matter? Lecter and Graham are both dead… and I’m like this. Do you want a glossy insert of my face, now?”

“What about the book you were going to write, Dr. Chilton? Weren’t you planning to call it The Dragonslayer? Why not let people know about how…”

“About how I was engulfed by the Dragon’s flames? Hardly.”

“Well, people love a survivor story.”

Freddie Lounds wiggled her hips and walked out the door.

***

When Frederick Chilton was released from the hospital, it had been six months since Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham had both, in theory, “died” over the waterfall and never found.

He was dropped off by a van to his huge empty house, that smelled vaguely of pine needles all over the place and had never felt less like home in his entire life.

He walked, slowly and carefully, over to the cordless phone that was plugged into his kitchen wall, and scrolled through the missed calls. No one wishing him well, but a few people asking how he was planning to vote in the “upcoming election”. The one that had already passed.

He was surprised that the electricity and water were even still on; he turned the faucet on and off a few times just to make sure it really was.

Who should he call, exactly, to let them know that he was back out in the land of the living? That the Red Dragon hadn’t ended him any more than Abel Gideon or Miriam Lass (poor little Miriam) had? 

No one seemed to care much.

Being Frederick Chilton was a very lonely place to be.

***

He almost didn’t believe it when he heard the phone ringing in the kitchen. He had taken his seat in front of his coffee table and was watching an episode of Murder She Wrote. He had never really paid attention to any of those old shows his parents liked to watch before, but it made him feel oddly calm.

It made him feel like they were back with him again. 

It had been a long time since they had stopped being around him; they had died while he was in medical school. He hadn’t come back for the funeral because what good could that do? They would still be dead, and he would just miss time being able to save other people by going back. Or not save, as the case may be – surgery turned out to not be Chilton’s forte in the least. That was when he had moved on to the mind, a glorious thing. 

People loved the idea of getting to see inside one another’s minds (as long as they weren’t the one being examined, that was) and psychiatrists got a lot of attention, if not a lot of salary. 

Now, the only attention that Chilton was likely to be getting would be from all the wrong places, places like…

Places like Tattle Crime.

He reluctantly picked up the phone. Maybe it was loneliness that was doing it – or maybe he had simply lost it after all of the time in the barometric chamber cut off from human contact. But he needed to see someone, anyone. Even if that person was Freddie Lounds.

He only hoped that she would agree to see him, too.

***

Freddie’s hair was done up like she was going to a premiere. Or maybe, like she was interviewing the next new big serial killer who was about to be splattered all over Tattle Crime. With her, the two things seemed to mean about the same.

She had a small smile on her face, too, one that made her look like she was suspicious of something, or maybe suspicious of someone. Chilton wasn’t sure if she was suspicious of him, of herself, or of the circumstances, but she would have a right to be in any of those cases after all. They were both from the elite group that made money in the business of murder. Maybe people less well-versed in psychiatry might refer to them both as psychopaths or sociopaths, even though neither of them were in the DSM anymore.

Maybe what they really were, instead, were mirror images, as the cynical case in Freddie’s eyes looked very similar to the one Chilton had often seen in his own.

“You came,” Chilton said, “I wasn’t sure that you would.”

“How could I resist getting to see the Dragonslayer in the flesh?”

“In what’s left of it,” Chilton replied dryly. 

“No pain, no gain, huh?” Freddie asked, smirking.

“Did you come just to gawk at me?” Chilton asked.

“I came to talk to you.”

Chilton walked over to the kitchen and then walked back, knotting his hands and letting out a sigh before walking back. He had never paced this much before his injury, never spent so much time walking places and cycling back just to prove that he could, to prove that he wasn’t still glued to a chair and dreaming it all.

“Talk then,” Chilton said finally, sitting on the couch and, with effort, putting one leg on top of the other and then replacing it. 

“You’re making a mistake not telling your story. Everyone is still yammering about the Murder Husbands…”

“Your phrase,” Chilton reminded her.

“My phrase, yes. But I could make you the Dragonslayer just as same. Then everyone would be talking about you.”

“Why would I want everyone talking about me?” Chilton fired back.

Freddie smirked.

“Because that’s what life is all about.” She took a step towards his place on the couch, and he couldn’t help but flinch a little. She didn’t mention it, and instead reached to cup his cheeks between her hands. “You should show this face off with pride.”

“To who?” Chilton asked, snorting. “Who would want to see this?”

“Me, for one,” Freddie replied. She stepped forward, so close now that he could feel her breath on his neck. “I’d like to see your face.”

“Are you flirting with a disfigured man?” Chilton asked. He wanted to be offended and tell her off, but something stopped him from moving from the spot. He couldn’t tell what – maybe it was just loneliness, or maybe he was realizing something about Freddie Lounds that he had never let strike him in the past.

“It worked in _The Phantom of the Opera_ ,” she fired back, and with that she leaned up and pressed her lips to the scarred remnants of his own (rebuilt, over time, stronger and faster perhaps). 

“Well, it didn’t work very well in _Phantom of the Opera_ ,” Chilton replied when he had a breath to take.

“Shut up,” Freddie replied, and kissed him again. “We’re going to be bigger than you could even imagine.”


End file.
